Strange Ubuntu/Vista Compatibility Bug, Solved

Walter Vos writes "Since I've been running Vista and Ubuntu in dual boot with a shared FAT32 partition for my personal folders, I've been seeing some strange compatibility issues between these two operating systems. Somehow Vista locks the folders on the FAT32 partition that are used for folders like Documents, Downloads, etc. A blogpost I wrote gives a detailed description of the problem and a fix for it."

Comments

FAT32

[Enderandrew]

NTFS-3G works pretty well. I'm not sure FAT32 is really necessary any more.

Re:FAT32

[duckInferno]

Stay away from FATMAN239. It nuked my hard drive.

Re:FAT32

[niteice]

There's a couple of ext3 drivers for Windows (one open-source, one not) that also work pretty well, so you can go both ways.

Re:FAT32

[CheshireFerk-o]

http://www.diskinternals.com/ they have a freeware ext2/ext3 proggy called 'linux reader' ive had it installed for quite a few months. plays my ext3 mp3storage in winamp just fine.

Re:FAT32

[MindlessAutomata]

I kept all my mp3s on an NTFS partition, and it made amarok incredibly slow for searching through files and even listing them when I wanted to expand a tree. It, of course, also was using up a ton of cpu power. Other intensive programs were causing me other problems, mostly more cpu usage quirks.

NTFS-3g is not perfect and I'd recommend steering clear of relying on NTFS on linux for heavy or day-today usage. I haven't used ubuntu on windows but I can imagine it would give a negative impression due to performance issues. For pulling off the occasion file off another partition, though, it works well.

When I moved all my mp3s to an ext3 partition, all the problems with amarok went away instantly.

Re:FAT32

[Ruie]

I think he would have the same problem with a ntfs drive.

The issue is that his Linux user setup and Windows user setup are different.
So when he mounts the partition all files are owned by root (as shown on the screen), and some files have public permissions turned off - a reasonable thing.

Thus what he needs to do is specify the owner of the files using uid=value
option in /etc/fstab (uid value can be found via "getent passwd", it is numeric).

For more info read "man mount" carefully.

Re:FAT32

[kiddygrinder]

ext2 works pretty well for ext3 drives so they don't care enough to do it. Anyone who does care about ext3 that much i'd guess probably doesn't care that much about windows.

Re:FAT32

[coolsnowmen]

I kept all my mp3s on an NTFS partition, and it made amarok incredibly slow for searching through files and even listing them when I wanted to expand a tree. It, of course, also was using up a ton of cpu power. Other intensive programs were causing me other problems, mostly more cpu usage quirks.

I found the default database backend slow, so switching to a better DB could be the solution. Even if your files are on NTFS, try having a postgres DB backend(on your fs of choice) and it should speed up your library searching.

Re:FAT32

[phantomfive]

Wow, google is good. I just did a search to find out exactly what fatman239 is, and the only thing that came up in the results was your post.

Re:FAT32

[FlyByPC]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_man

Mod parent down - it's not true!

[Anonymous Coward]

It actually cannot suck dick. That's my main issue with it. I downloaded and installed Ubuntu with the full expectation of some dick sucking and it never came to pass. What the fuck is that about? You, sir, are a liar and a fraud.

Re:Mod parent down - it's not true!

[teh moges]

Ubuntu can easily handle a FAT16, but has trouble handling a FAT32. It needs more practice I suppose.

Re:Mod parent down - it's not true!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least it doesn't fuck you in the ass like Vista does.

Damn

[MichaelSmith]

For a moment there I thought somebody had fixed Ubuntu bug one.

I suspsect that...

[Psychotria]

if the owner/group permissions were set properly in fstab an easier solution would prevail

Linux newbie finds FAT32 file perms don't work...

[Anonymous Coward]

... gets page linked from slashdot.

Well, at least I adblock.

Just Delete The Egomaniac.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, I'm having a problem with permissions between Vista and Ubuntu. What should I do?

Adopt a philosophy of ideological inflexibility, intolerance, ignorance, immaturity, and narcissism?

...or...

Run a shell script or two?

Decisions, decisions...

Re:you are hollow,

[grantek]

It's lame because games should work under linux. It's not necessarily you being lame, it's either game developers being lame by not porting their games, Windows being lame that it's hard for the Wine crew to implement it with the exactness needed for games, or both, if the lame games are using bits of Windows that are lame when stuff like OpenGL could help.

It's lame that people feel like they're being held hostage by an operating system that they don't otherwise want, and it's lame that MS is making money off that. If you actually want Windows for one reason or another, then it's not lame at all.

oh my god.

[nawcom]

The Effectiveness of the Ubuntu Forums

(The link this person gives in his blog post)

I swear to christ, reading that page made me want to kill a kitten.

Re:Not a vista bug

[Qzukk]

It's not a bug, it's old knowledge getting flushed out of the general awareness of the public. FAT has a read-only bit and Linux knows about it, it's in there along with the system and hidden file bits:

#define ATTR_RO 1 /* read-only */

(linux/msdos_fs.h)

Re:Linux newbie finds FAT32 file perms don't work.

[jamie]

either timothy never used a Linux distro and thinks this is newsworthy, or this is the slowest news day ever

Timothy was last seen putting Ubuntu on an XO. He's been using Linux at least since I met him in 1999.

It's August, every day is a slow news day :)

IFS Kit; Vista 64 Test Mode

[tepples]

What keeps people from implementing ext3 support for Windows? The Linux source code is obviously available, so are Windows ext2 drivers reimplementations that aren't using existing code? Or is there some deeper problem?

For a while, Microsoft once charged roughly $1,000 for the "IFS Kit" used to develop installable file system drivers. To work around this, programs such as "Explore2fs" had to act like WinRAR and 7-Zip, where you don't really mount a partition but you can still drag files in and out. (The price appears to have dropped since then.) For another thing, 64-bit versions of Windows Vista put an annoying "Test Mode" banner in all four corners of the desktop if the user installs a device driver that hasn't been signed by a publisher who pays an annual fee of at least $200 to a commercial certificate authority trusted by Microsoft.

Re:Not a vista bug

[greg1104]

This started in XP actually. The problem is that Microsoft sets the read-only attribute on the special folders that get custom views. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/326549 for information about the root cause of the problem reported on this blog. Fixing it on the Windows side requires one to go all old-school and use attrib; cracked me up.

Re:As my grandmother used to say

[Your.Master]

Nor has she ever gone outside in her life.

Re:As my grandmother used to say

[SeekerDarksteel]

Let's just make it red, blue, AND green should never been seen.

Hey, did it just get awfully dark in here?

Re: Ubuntu and NTFS

[szaka]

NTFS-3G changes rapidly and historically Ubuntu included an old, lower performing version of the NTFS-3G driver. However the one in Ubuntu 8.04 should be ok.

Amarok has a documented performance issue with NTFS-3G: http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#dd

The NTFS-3G web site has many tips what could be the problem for high CPU usage: http://ntfs-3g.org/support.html#cpu100

Sometimes NTFS defragmentation makes a magic.

The focus of the NTFS-3G development is reliability and functionality over performance. The performance optimizations started only recently and the current development versions perform close or sometimes surprisingly even better than ext3.